7:30am

8:45am

Everyone claims they are “agile” but are you and your team actually effective? It's time for a practical, pragmatic, real-world take on software development and programming. Let's go beyond one-size-fits-all rules, mis-applied “agile,” and rigid adherence to previous “best practices” that may no longer apply. Let's look at what it takes to succeed in modern software development by growing code and growing your skills.

Join Andy Hunt, one of the 17 authors of the original Agile Manifesto and co-founder of The Pragmatic Bookshelf for this look at what it takes to succeed in modern software development.

Andy Hunt is a programmer turned consultant, author and publisher. He authored the best-selling book “The Pragmatic Programmer” and eight others, was one of the 17 authors of the Agile Manifesto and founders of the Agile Alliance, and co-founded the Pragmatic Bookshelf, publishing... Read More →

10:00am

Step by step introduction to get unit testing, UI testing, mocking and continuous integration up and running for your Swift projects. The session will cover mostly iOS projects but we’ll also look at running Swift on the Linux platform.

Godfrey is founder and president of RIIS LLC, a mobile development firm in the Detroit Metro area. He is also author of "Bulletproof Android", "Android Best Practices", "Decompiling Android" and "Decompiling Java." Godfrey has spoken at several AnDevcons as well as JavaOne, ASP-Connections... Read More →

10:00am

Agile Leadership is ambiguously perceived as guiding an organization toward an agile approach. However, in doing so, most of these so called agile leaders are inadvertently working against their agile intentions through traditional thinking and behaviors. Leadership Agility, on the other hand, is a characteristic of the leader individually. Leadership Agility represents the agile mindset and actions of a leader in how they interact with others and lead the organization in an agile way. Join us to elicit your own "AHA" as we explore leadership stories grounded in a agile leadership development framework. Discover how unaware leaders, while well-intentioned, work against their own efforts. We will reorient leaders from an external focus on organizations and delivery and toward the leader's own internal thinking and behaviors.

Pete Behrens is a Leadership Agility Coach with Trail Ridge Consulting focusing on leadership and organizational agility.
He provides guidance to senior executives on how to transform themselves and their companies to work more effectively with more agility. His leadership has enhanced agility across many organizations including Salesforce.com, GE Health... Read More →

10:00am

In order to achieve extraordinary coordination, starlings flock in formations called murmurations. These formations behave mathematically similar to metals becoming magnetized and snow crystals before an avalanche. These are examples of systems where collective phenomena emerge from the short-range interactions of individual participants. Studies show that change in direction (orientation) of individual participants affect group behavior more than velocity. This sort of relationship is known as a scale-free correlation. In this presentation, I will discuss how the concepts associated with murmuration, along with engineering and teams practices can be applied to software teams, in order to reach a state of criticality.

DJ has been using state models and asynchronous processing for many years to solve business problems for companies of all sizes. As small as a logistics software company responsible for the routing of trucks, a web hosting company responsible for the handling of website malware detection... Read More →

10:00am

Many of us have been working on or managing Agile projects for years without an in-depth understanding of the mechanics of product development flow. The relationships between cycle time, batch size, queue size, and work-in-progress are not always clear to us, especially when we are in the middle of a project. In this session, participants will be running experiments in a web-based tool built by the presenter that demonstrates the effects of flow variables on the productivity of a system. You'll walk away with a very clear understanding of the principles of flow impacting your team's productivity, and insight into how to take action for improvement.

Peter Kananen is a Partner and Delivery Manager at Gaslight, an agile software development company that works with everyone from growing San Francisco startups and disruptive education companies to Fortune 500 giants like P&G and Omnicare. Peter spends his days tracking the happiness... Read More →

10:00am

Complexity, chaos, blah-blah-blah, whatever. How's this mad new rush of definition & theory really going to change what we do? The good news is we have part of what we need. If we position the valuable parts of agility within the new conceptual frameworks, we can see more easily how to proceed. We can heighten the value of what we have, extend its range, and add new practices that emphasize the most valuable strategies.

This session is an idea-generator. By considering the old practices in the new framework, we'll build ourselves a set of clues, steps, paths, and experiments to start wrestling our new development model into line with our new understanding of professional geekery.

GeePaw Hill is an independent software development coach. A geek for nearly 40 years, he has been doing, teaching, and coaching software using the various techniques of agility since the late '90s. He has worked with large teams and tiny ones all over the world, creating everything... Read More →

10:00am

If you work in an office, your boss has probably forced you into a brainstorming session or two (or 12). Invented in the 1940s by an advertising executive, the purpose was to solicit a large amount of ideas in a short period of time. By putting a collective of creative people in the same room, better concepts should come. Sounds very agile.

However, science has shown several times that brainstorming is a terrible technique. It’s cumbersome due to all of the interdependent activities happening at once. When spending time generating ideas as a group, you often spend more time thinking of others ideas than your own.

Fortunately, a relatively unknown technique is starting to gain popularity called brainwriting. Incorporating it into your team events can produce more diverse ideas and provide a friendlier environment for collaboration. In this session, we will workshop them and leave the audience with all of the tools to bring the technique back to their offices.

Key Learnings:The fallacy of brainstormingWhat makes an idea diverseA walkthrough of using brainwriting in Agile events

Chris Murman's first job out of college was the weekend sports anchor at an NBC affiliate. If he had only known what was in store!Interestingly enough, he still loves telling the stories of others every day. Each interaction is an opportunity to learn what made you unique, and understand... Read More →

10:00am

Continuous Delivery promises to radically change the way we work, even the way we think about software development. It's powerful, impressive, awesome and ...

Nobody understands it. Or, perhaps, they all understand it differently. In his presentation Matt Heusser provides visual and verbal tools to collaborate about what continuous delivery is and how to get there, mostly at a whiteboard. Learn a few diagrams you can draw at the whiteboard, then close with an exercise to explain the benefits of Continuous Delivery; take it home to run back at the office!

10:00am

Ninety-five percent of true leadership is self-leadership. When you get that right you won't be surprised to see others following. But how do you lead yourself? It starts by signing up for—i.e., assigning yourself ownership and personal responsibility for—an important problem or opportunity that is larger than you, and then inspiring others to join you.Many people have found The Responsibility Process to be an essential tool for self-leadership. The Responsibility Process reveals the mental pattern we use to process thoughts about taking and avoiding responsibility in our lives. It shows how we lead ourselves to results that matter or stay stuck. In this interactive session we will learn how to apply The Responsibility Process to face challenges, overcome obstacles, and produce results that matter. You will leave with tools, practices, and the beginnings of a "meta-skill" of taking complete ownership of your life, work, and relationships.

UNLOCKING YOUR NATURAL ABILITY TO LIVE AND LEAD WITH POWER. |
Christopher Avery "The Responsibility Process guy" is a reformed management consultant. After a decade helping corporations help smart, ambitious professionals find ways to cope with lives they don't want and think they... Read More →

10:00am

This portfolio adaptation of the Featureban game (created by Mike Burrows) explores how Lean and Agile principles can apply in real portfolios with real challenges such as planning around shared services, overcoming exploding work in process, and facing the repercussions of outdated HR practices. During this experiential session, attendees will learn to measure and manage flow at the portfolio level in alignment with strategic direction. As an added bonus, Featureban is Creative Commons licensed, so attendees may recreate and modify the game to play with their teams/colleagues.

Cat specializes in lean inspired, data informed leadership and coaching. She is passionate about increasing diversity in STEAM as a means of creating the possibility of a more equitable human future based on generative institutions. In her leisure time, Cat enjoys making jokes about... Read More →

10:00am

Open Space Technology is one way to enable all kinds of people, in any kind of organization, to create inspired meetings and events. Over the last 20+ years, it has also become clear that opening space, as an intentional leadership practice, can create inspired organizations, where ordinary people work together to create extraordinary results with regularity.

In Open Space meetings, events and organizations, participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel working sessions around a central theme of strategic importance, such as: What is the strategy, group, organization or community that all stakeholders can support and work together to create?

With groups of 5 to 2000+ people — working in one-day workshops, three-day conferences, or the regular weekly staff meeting — the common result is a powerful, effective connecting and strengthening of what’s already happening in the organization: planning and action, learning and doing, passion and responsibility, participation and performance.

April Jefferson is an Agile transformation consultant and organizational change coach. She is passionate about empowering others to foster social change and uses Agile, Lean, UX, design thinking and open space to create awesome solutions and positive organizational cultures. She helps... Read More →

10:55am

Another movement sweeping through corporate America with the same steam as Agile is Business Intelligence & Big Data. I must admit that I am a data junkie who enjoys analyzing data to identify patterns that tell a story. I am also a passionate Agilist, playing the role of change agent in Agile Transformations. Therefore, my natural inclination has always been to couple the two together to drive change. Unfortunately, the sad truth is the practice has not always lead to the desired outcome. Like everything else that could be used for good, unfortunately, data can also be leveraged for evil. This talk centers on the power of data and the ability for it to be both detrimental and invaluable in change initiatives. Ask any good Agile coach about the ticking time bomb that is Agile metrics and assessments, and they will warn you to tread lightly. I am no different, as I am using this opportunity to share with others my failures and successes in this area. I have learned the hard way that without an environment of safety, experimentation, and short feedback loops, collecting team metrics and insights can actually lead to more harm than good. However, once the prerequisite of safety is established, data no longer becomes your enemy as a change agent, but your ally, and a powerful tool in your Agile coaching toolbox. I had the good fortune of experiencing this with a client that had a culture ripe for positive data driven change. As an Agile Practice tasked with improving the flow of work within each value stream, we collected multiple data points from teams to help us identify coaching needs, investment areas, and continuous improvement opportunities. Our mission quickly became to create a direct feedback channel from those doing the work to those making decisions so that leadership had visibility into the impediments preventing them from achieving organizational agility. Attendees will walk away from this session with a solid understanding of when to turn to data and when to steer away from it. They will be introduced to Agile team data collection methods such as team self-assessments, cross team retrospective impediment roll ups, employee happiness meter readings, and role specific surveys so that they can experiment with each. Key points will focus on how to analyze and formulate the data to tell a meaningful story to all levels of the organization to help drive positive change.

Michael McCalla is a technology leader, transformation specialist, and avid agile practitioner. He has a passion for building great products and coaching organizations to create a value driven environment that fosters collaboration, empowerment, safety, and learning. Michael has... Read More →

10:55am

Is your group, conference, or company basically just a sea of white men? Lots of people see this, but aren't sure how to remedy it. We'll learn how to expand your network, as well as become a more welcoming environment, all with only a little bit of feeling uncomfortable.

Amber Conville is a developer at Test Double (testdouble.com), and has been a software developer for several years. She also is the founder and organizer of Self.conference (selfconference.org), a local conference about tech and people. She loves code in lots of languages, tdd, craftsmanship... Read More →

10:55am

This presentation will help you quantify software qualities. Quality in delivered software is intangible and very different from quality in physical goods. Some external attributes of quality software—free from defects and easy to maintain—are reflections of the code’s internal qualities. When classes and methods are cohesive, non-redundant, well-encapsulated, assertive, and explicitly coupled, they are less prone to mistakes and far easier to debug, test, and maintain. David Bernstein asserts that paying attention to code quality helps us focus on the key principles, patterns, and practices used by expert developers. If you don’t pay attention to critical code quality attributes, iterative development practices can quickly degrade code into a maintenance nightmare. Join David and take a deep dive into the code qualities that make software more maintainable and less bug friendly. Create software that not only provides value now but also is easy to change and extend so it can continue to deliver value far into the future.

David Scott Bernstein is the author of the new book _Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software._ It’s an insider’s view of the software industry drawn from his decades of hands-on experience as a software developer, trainer, and consultant... Read More →

10:55am

Prioritization of work is hard across all levels of the organization. When we focus on feature value, often the first indicator of value is dollars versus effort expended. But what about value that is not realized through dollars? Our customers do not only think in dollars.

By expanding the definition of what value can truly mean, we can normalize, rationalize, and quantify value in new and different ways that make sense to all of our customers. We can assess value across programs as well as engage team members and stakeholders through interactive activities. In a way, it’s like relative sizing to drive values that appeal to many different consumers of your product.

Natalie first demonstrates traditional value estimation (dollars) and the resulting feature map/prioritization. Then, we look at other types of value realization through a team or program level activity using common customer sense. The activity provides participants with hands-on experience estimating and mapping feature value sans dollars on a level playing field. This gives Product Owners and teams a better baseline to align enterprise and program roadmaps with their own team or product priorities - and most importantly what the customer actually values - dollars aside!

Natalie Warnert is the primary founder of the Women in Agile initiative, which enables, empowers, and expands the distribution of new and diverse ideas in the agile and technology communities worldwide. She is a frequent speaker on business and agile topics including product strategy... Read More →

11:45am

1:00pm

As a consultant I see a lot of organizations use metric in inappropriate ways to measure teams. These metrics lead to a lot of fear and mistrust. At the heart of these metrics 9 time out of 10 times velocity is at the heart of it. This talk will focus on using Flow, Quality, Happiness, Agile Fluency, and Business Value as a diagnostic tool to help teams grow and support coaching. I use these 5 metrics because the combination of metrics balances each other. When you push more Flow on a team with a lower Agile Fluency the first thing to change is quality, and then quickly followed by happiness and then the delivery of value. Conversely, when you teach a team to harness data in positive way and see how to improve their delivery your teams will flourish.

James Gifford is an industry respected Agile/Lean coach that has executed multiple enterprise level transformation during his 14 year technology career. James is a cofounder and board member of the Agile Uprising. James has effectively had a positive impact on over 160 teams in a... Read More →

1:00pm

Have you ever wondered whether the endless stream of features you are building really make a difference? With so many possibilities for business, vendor software, and technology investment, how confident do you feel that you are placing the right bets to move your business forward? Are you achieving the multiples of return that you could be? How do you know? Agile and Lean practices applied to strategy and portfolio management can give you a disciplined approach to align investments with strategy and optimize value by enhancing portfolio decisions with early and frequent investment feedback from customers. Come learn about how companies like Ford are leveraging this approach to reduce the lead time to get investment opportunities to market, measure their impact on business results, and adjust investment plans frequently to maximize business outcomes.

Key take-aways for participants:

1. Learn about the fundamentals of agile portfolio management and how these practices enable value delivery at the speed the business requires

- Thin-slicing large multi-million dollar investments into small, valuable deliveries- Leverage enterprise business architecture maps and connect investment opportunities to their impact on the business value stream(s) - Collaboratively harnessing the creativity of the business and IT solution acumen to surface and articulate innovative opportunities - Empower stable, high performing teams to take reasoned risks while delivering business value in nimble ways

2. Learn about the experiments being conducted within Ford which include:

- Dropping the cycle time for customer initiatives to valuable, delivered solution from 2+ years to 9 months- Setting up robust methods to compare small, better articulated investments that always include Why- Enabling more frequent portfolio steering to ensure value delivery and make better investment decisions- Encouraging more direct measurement of value on investments- Align investments to business value streams to build trust with the business and improve IT’s strategy- Build predictability by creating stable, high-performing teams that are in consistent collaboration with their solution-building partners - Drastically simplify financial approvals and financial tracking while converting portions of the PPM governance to keep focus on building the right thing

Engages directly with Executives and other champions to drive cultural transformations towards better ROI and robust Business Agility. I use innovative Portfolio Management and unparalleled alignment from strategy to delivery to encourage demonstrable outcome. At enterprise scale... Read More →

I’m an accomplished leader passionate about developing fun, high performing teams. I combine business savvy, strategic thinking, a technical background and passion for applying lean and agile to focus my organization on delivering value. I've been involved with several large scale... Read More →

1:00pm

Over 3 months John recorded over 60 hours of interviews and spoke to some of the most respected people in the industry to produce an audio documentary that attempts to answer the question “What is safety? And why is it important anyway?”

This highly interactive talk will present the findings and guide and challenge you through a journey to understanding safety. Including short interactive sessions and role play exercises to cover the following topics:

What is safety and what does it look and feel like?

Is trust essential to high performing teams?

Is vulnerability at the core of a creative team?

How can leaders can help foster (or hinder) safety?

This talk has grown as John created the new podcast The Agile Path. The first season on this podcast (launching early 2017) is about safety in teams. John has interviewed world renowned specialists in the field; Christopher Avery, David Marquet, Jerry Weinberg, Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, Woody Zuill and many more in over 60 hours of audio. This has been a fascinating deep dive learning experience for John and he hopes to explore these insights with the audience.

John has over 17 years of experience working in software engineering as a system administrator, software engineer, technical lead, technical director, development manager and agile coach. He currently runs the consultancy firm Wise Noodles here he helps organisations solve tough technical... Read More →

1:00pm

Stable Teams have long been a known and accepted leading practice in agile. And Tuckman's stages of group development proves the need for stable teams, right? But what if that's not correct? Doc posits that Tuckman's is actually a disproven theory that none-the-less mysteriously persists. What if, by stabilizing teams, we solved a completely different problem? And what if by de-stabilizing teams we could better solve other problems?

Doc is passionate about working with teams to improve delivery and building great organizations. Once a dedicated code slinger, Doc has turned his energy toward helping teams, departments, and companies work better together in the pursuit of better software. Working with a wide range... Read More →

1:00pm

You might be working on all sorts of great things. You’ve got training, coaching, cross functional teams, continuous delivery, you’re scaling Agile, etc.

You’re still doomed.

Why?

Because Agile is just one part of a much larger picture. A picture that requires people not only to change their processes and software, but how they see themselves and their place in your organization.

This change requires more than transformational thinking. It requires revolutionary thinking.

Todd helps leaders become intentional about their organizational culture, so that they can revolutionize the way they work. Todd combines his background in Improv with over 15 years of experience in the software industry as a Developer, Manager, Agile Coach, and Lean Startup Mentor... Read More →

1:00pm

Achieving organizational agility in a large, complex company is a meaty challenge. Do you start bottom-up? Or top down? The truth is you need to start both simultaneously and try to meet in the middle. In this session we'll be talking about all of the things that you do at the executive leadership level provide the support, funding and conditions to create a successful agile program that will lead to high-performing teams. Equally important is creating new behaviours at the leadership level. We'll also cover what's necessary at the team level to build an agile team, behaviour and practices in order to drive the results needed to remove the next barrier on your progression to agility. This is the story of what we're doing at a large Canadian financial institution. Throughout the session we will be bouncing between what's happening at all levels to create and sustain a successful agile program. You will leave this session with insights in how to create a strategy that manages the complexities of rolling out modern engineering and leadership practices in traditional non-software organizations.

As an organizational designer, principal coach and trainer, Dave has an excellent reputation for facilitating the philosophical adoption and practical implementation of agility practices and training in large organizations. With over 20 years of management experience he has successfully... Read More →

1:00pm

Many people agree that one important outcome of Behavior Driven Development is a set of regression tests to demonstrate the desired behavior and ensure that it is maintained over time. Then they often struggle to do so in a manner that remains maintainable as the system and the test code grows larger. Sometimes they even abandon their tests and start over, repeatedly.

In this session we'll examine the evolutionary history of an application and its test suite. We'll stop at various stages in its life to consider the choices we might make to address growing complexity.

We'll work using Cucumber-JVM and Java in order to be accessible to a large audience. You can apply these concepts in other languages and test frameworks. Rather than depending on having enough laptops set up, we'll use mob programming to enable everyone's participation.

If you'd prefer exploring on your own machine, bring your laptop loaded and ready to go. Clone the code repository from https://github.com/gdinwiddie/EquineHoroscope to get the code and its history. Unzip http://idiacomputing.com/pub/EquineHoroscopeJars.zip in the same directory for the dependencies. (Download sample at https://leanpub.com/EvolutionaryAnatomy/ for even more detailed instructions.) I'll be using Eclipse, and the instructions are tuned for that, but you can use any Java IDE.

Bonus: Participants will receive a coupon for a free e-book on the material.

The promoter of the “Three Amigos” name for collaborative exploration of business requirements, George has worked with others to further the practical application of Behavior Driven Development (BDD). He helps organizations refine their business requirements to produce long-term... Read More →

Heidi Helfand is Director of Engineering Excellence at Procore Technologies, creators of cloud-based software for the construction industry. She is the author of the book Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams which challenges the notion that you need to keep your... Read More →

Joshua is the CEO of Industrial Logic. Since the late 1990s, he has been actively practicing and improving Agile methods, from Extreme Programming to Lean Development and Lean Startup. Joshua is an international speaker and author of the best-selling, Jolt Cola-award winning book... Read More →

1:00pm

Useless \ˈyüs-ləs\use·less: not fulfilling or not expected to achieve the intended purpose or desired outcome.[Synonyms: futile, to no avail, (in) vain, pointless, to no purpose, hopeless, ineffectual, ineffective, to no effect, fruitless, unprofitable, profitless, unproductive]

If you want to stop building useless software, then you have to start understanding your customers. Unfortunately there’s no magic trick for reading their minds. But there is a simple technique that can help you gain insights and build empathy for them.

Empathy mapping is a simple activity for your team, stakeholders and anyone else who is responsible for delivering products and services. It allows you to collectively explore what your customers see, hear, say & do, as well as consider what they think and feel. This leads to insights about their pain and potential wants which are the keys to building more useful software.

In this session, Diane guides you through building an empathy map, showing you how to use silent brainstorming to encourage everyone to contribute. You will see, first-hand, how easy it is to work collaboratively to create a shared understanding of the customer. And that is the first step to start building software that customers find useful.

Several years ago, Diane traded a career in corporate America for a life of coaching and she has never looked back. She now uses her 13 years of experience to help groups, from Fortune 50 companies to the U.S. Government, transform their people into high-performing teams. Drawing... Read More →

1:55pm

As software developers, our goal is to typically write software that meets the needs of our clients, whether they be internal or external clients. Often times, when we miss the mark, it is due to a communication breakdown between the developer team and the client team on what the actual requirements are. Communication breakdowns generally occur between people with different communication styles. So how do we bridge that gap and get the information we need from people who communicate differently than we do? This talk will be an exploration of communication styles and how we can recognize our own communication style as well as easily determine the communication style of others. With this information we can communicate with someone in the style in which they best receive information. When we communicate with others in their learning style, we break down barriers and are more able to accurately get to the pain points that they need a solution for. Once the communication barriers are down, it becomes easier to get the requirements that we are looking for.

Angel is a founder and chapter leader for the Toledo chapter of Girl Develop It. She works as a software developer for Center for Information Management in Ann Arbor, Michigan and volunteers at non profit organizations in Toledo where she uses her skills in software and web development... Read More →

1:55pm

We spend too much time focused on doing better. "Go faster”, “Put more people on the problem", “Reduce costs", “Just get it shipped!” Do any of these sound familiar? We excel at fire fighting and bandaid solutions.

We do not spend enough time focused on being better. We need leaders to step up, forge a new path to shift culture, and demonstrate through their example. Then we need everyone else to follow this new path and step into their own personal leadership too.

We need to evoke the Soul of Agile. The soul is deep and is the root of everything else. When we lack soul, we lack brilliance. We lack creativity, inspiration, and innovation. We can't wow anyone inside or outside of our company. Work doesn't have to be hard, painful, or a struggle. It can be light, engaging, interesting, and a space of curiosity and connection. Join Selena to learn practical techniques to bring more soul to work and enable real success for your Agile transformation.

Selena Delesie is a leadership and transformation coach, speaker, and author. She is a trusted guide for leaders who seek to improve their business and their life—from the heart. Selena blends sixteen years of experience in the technology industry with a broad range of studies... Read More →

1:55pm

Let's face it -- adopting the practices and principles surrounding lean and Agile are difficult. Some folks do a great job at doing some of the framework related activities; however, doing "the Agile" is much different that being Agile. For that matter, some call what they do as Agile and in reality, it's still very much command-and-control management 1.0.

This session is about looking at what works well with teams and working through common Agile adoption challenges. We'll explore the science of what it means to actually have an Agile Mindset. We'll review how the principles and values of Agile and lean help drive engagement, motivation, quality, innovation, and, ultimately, productivity.

Please come join this interactive presentation where we'll map the many practices in our agile and leadership toolboxes to the behaviors and underlying roots to everyday challenges teams and organizations have when adoption agile -- hopefully together, we'll find some solutions to try at your organization.

Matt Badgley Lean/Agile Coaching and Services Director at VersionOne CSM, CSPO, SAFe SPC With a career in Information Technology that has officially reached drinking age, Matt has wore one too many hats in roles from Systems Analyst to Programmer to IT Manager to Programmer to Director... Read More →

1:55pm

“My Agile is better than your Agile.” It seems like every day, I witness a Twitter war between two thought leaders criticizing one another’s framework. Ironically, these frameworks are simply a set of practices that apply the same set of values and principles. Don’t get me wrong, I am not minimizing the value of a framework. Many of them have been created by some of the great thought leaders of our time. They have provided us with a wealth of tried and true practices, all of which reside in my Agile coaching toolbox.

The truth is frameworks and practices are simply a means to an end, better business outcomes. CEOs are not interested in Scrum, SAFe, or Kanban, but rather customer satisfaction, time to market, reliability, and innovation, to only name a few. As practitioners, I included, we tend to get hung up on the framework, allowing it to drive outcomes. Instead, we should be applying an experimental approach in which we enable the desired outcome to drive the practices we adopt.

Over the past few years, books like The Lean Startup (Ries), Lean Change Management (Little), and The Lean Enterprise (Owens/Fernandez), have influenced me to take this somewhat backwards view to Agile transformation and organizational change. I have had my share of successes and failures as a change agent, but I am finding more success with this approach, and it just feels right. The purpose of this presentation is to help others see change initiatives through the same lens.

As Agilists, we need to be adaptive and maintain an open mind. Organizations are complex adaptive systems, each unique with its own set of challenges, values, and objectives. There is certainly not a one size fits all approach for organization Agile adoption. To add to the complexity, every Agile team within the system is different in its own sense, each having slightly different goals.

Given the enormous complexity, where do we start? The answer is not Scrum, but rather outcomes.

Learning Objectives for Attendees:

1. Agile is a mindset, based off of 4 values, defined by 12 principles, manifested through unlimited amount of practices, that enable business outcomes2. There are number of different frameworks offered by the Agile community, not just Scrum3. Review the a high level business outcome(s) that each framework is tailored to such as customer satisfaction, time to market, employee satisfaction, reliability, flow, adaptability, and predictability4. Share a “practice catalog” that I have built over the years that consists of practices across multiple frameworks and which outcomes they contribute to 5. Given the uniqueness of each organization, framework practices should be continuously experimented with within the team and the organization until the right blend is found to meet their desired outcomes.

After being educated on the high level business outcome that each framework is tailored to help achieve, the presentation will include an exercise in which the participants will be tasked with building an organization team structure given a set of unique objectives and business outcomes.

Michael McCalla is a technology leader, transformation specialist, and avid agile practitioner. He has a passion for building great products and coaching organizations to create a value driven environment that fosters collaboration, empowerment, safety, and learning. Michael has... Read More →

2:40pm

3:00pm

Though most CEOs and senior executives tout their dedication to innovation, the sad reality is that the majority of corporate cultures are actually indifferent or even hostile to innovative, disruptive ideas. Poor communication, lack of empowerment, and risk-aversion are common innovation-killers that trap teams in a business-as-usual mentality. CEO of LeanDog, Jon Stahl, discusses these challenges and how to mitigate them with Lean Startup practices, empowered teams, and design thinking. Using real world examples, Jon demonstrates how companies of any size or market can build and foster a successful culture of innovation.

Jon Stahl is the CEO and co-founder of LeanDog, a company that is focused on Lean-Agile consulting as well as product design and delivery. Jon has been practicing and upholding the values of the Agile Manifesto and Lean for over 12 years. He teaches and coaches companies, at all levels... Read More →

3:00pm

Scores of applications. Hundreds of production deployments per week. Test automation is a must. But how does a QA department go from a manual test shop to fully automated test coverage within a continuous integration and deployment environment?

In this talk you’ll hear how our QA team for the leading global knowledge platform JSTOR (www.jstor.org) chose our tools, built our pipeline, and trained our team from the ground up. We’ll describe our early steps towards full automation, walking through what worked (and didn’t work) for us, and where we plan to go from here.

Jayshree Bhakta is a quality advocate at Ithaka(JSTOR) and a firm believer of "Quality Assurance is a process, not a department". To make that a reality she keeps herself informed about and contributes in all the aspects of the product. She is currently on a dual track agile team... Read More →

3:00pm

What if we took Extreme Programming and said it’s not “extreme” enough? What if we took pair programming and cranked it to 11? Mob programming is a technique with “all the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and on the same computer.”

I was lucky enough to be on a team for about year that worked “as a mob.” I’m also now leading a team that is mobbing full time and using mob programming for workshops and other learning experiences. Come learn what practices we found to be critical, what obstacles we encountered and what practices became irrelevant during our experience.

A husband, father of four, and currently the Founding Software Craftsman of Greater Sum, Mike Clement believes we work best when we are working together and that there are no best practices—only better and worse ones depending on the context. Passionate about raising the bar of... Read More →

3:00pm

Do your DevOps or Agile teams include a finance manager, marketing director, executive strategist, compliance officer, security expert, risk management representative, etc? If your teams are continuously deploying, are your customers and customer support agents kept continuously informed? Are your development teams able to relate their work back to the strategy set forth by executive leadership? Does portfolio investment clearly align to the executive strategy? If you’ve answered "no" to any of these questions, then your Agile will never truly scale.

For medium and large sized organizations, establishing Agile teams is only part of the puzzle of maximizing value delivered. Optimizing the interactions between teams is the secret to recognizing the greatest gains in efficiency and productivity. By creating an organization wide coherence check of the efforts of “separate” value streams and functions, you can create a truly Agile organization with the ability to quickly deliver value to customers while anticipating and planning for the future needs of the market.

This session is intended for leaders, managers, and change agents serving organizations that are struggling with or just beginning to attempt Agility at scale. It offers actionable and proven advice for understanding and improving the relationships between teams, functions, and products/services.

Cat specializes in lean inspired, data informed leadership and coaching. She is passionate about increasing diversity in STEAM as a means of creating the possibility of a more equitable human future based on generative institutions. In her leisure time, Cat enjoys making jokes about... Read More →

3:00pm

In spite of all of the nuanced discussions, debates and frequent diatribes, scaling agile is about one thing: getting large groups of teams to deliver value in an organized fashion while maintaining empathy, rapport, trust, safety, and ownership across the enterprise. During this session we will explore the case study of the Value Steam Container, looking at organization design, challenges and success.

James Gifford is an industry respected Agile/Lean coach that has executed multiple enterprise level transformation during his 14 year technology career. James is a cofounder and board member of the Agile Uprising. James has effectively had a positive impact on over 160 teams in a... Read More →

3:00pm

Whether you do testing, development only, managing, scheduling, or sales, your work is thinking. You spend a lot of time learning, making decisions, discovering rules and facts, making mistakes and learning from them, reading code, guessing what might work and then confirming or disproving your guess. You try to concentrate, and also to keep your mind fresh and energized. You take on long term tasks, and try not to become overwhelmed. And your thinking doesn't happen in a closet. You are constantly interacting with other people. How can we productively think and learn together? Come see what we have learned so far, experience complexity, decision making, and some basics of energy management through games, facts, pictures, and dialog. Come have fun, learn something useful, wake up your brain!

Tim is a long-time programmer (since 1979), reviewer, speaker, writer. He has been active in many of the big changes in software over the past 36 years (including Design Patterns, Object-Oriented Design, and Agile software development). | | In addition to his contributions in "Clean... Read More →

3:00pm

Design sprints allow teams to solve an essential business problems in five days by mapping the problem, sketching alternative solutions, deciding on an approach, then prototyping and testing with representative users. They are useful in a variety of circumstances, but particularly when you’ve got a big problem, little time to solve it, and don’t know where to start.

I will provide a brief overview of design sprints, guide participants through exercises from the design sprint process, and share lessons learned from running more than 10 design sprints across multiple industries and organizations.

Derek is an Experience Architect at Pillar Technology and the founder of Future Experience, a consulting agency specializing in Design Sprints and Lean User Experience (UX). He is a Digital Strategist, Product Management Consultant, Design Lead, and Innovation Facilitator, with more... Read More →

3:00pm

Organizational and team culture is rooted in implicit assumptions about how individuals relate to one another in getting work done. To foster alignment or change, it’s critical to have open and frank discussions about what we assume and what we value: this workshop will demonstrate how to have that conversation using LEGO Serious Play

Participants will learn:Models for identifying the nature of their organizational and team cultureQuestions they can use with their team to faciitate conversations about assumptions and valuesExperience with using LEGO Serious Play to facilitate challenging conversation

Ellen Grove is an Agile coach and trainer who helps teams to do better work by coaching them to cocreate the circumstances in which they can work productively and effectively. Her Agile coaching practice is founded in over 18 years’ experience leading software testing, development... Read More →

3:00pm

It can be stressful to miss release deadlines. It can be maddening to sort through a flat backlog. How can you find that needle in the haystack of ideas? Story Mapping is a technique to help you visualize and sort through your ideas to create releasable slices of functionality. Join us for a hands on learning experience to enable you to Keep Calm and Story Map on.

Nate Lusher is an Agile Coach at CoverMyMeds. He’s spent the last 17 years as a software developer and coach - building software and helping software development organizations deliver products which delight customers. He’s passionate about helping teams discover ways of working... Read More →

3:55pm

To remain viable in an increasingly competitive digital marketplace, enterprises need to address challenges, which are coupled tightly with global HRM practices to recruit, engage and develop key talent who build high quality and innovative enterprise software and systems.“What effect does Agile software development have on legacy HRM processes and practices?” In many cases HRM discipline is left out in a typical Agile Transition journey, on the contrary HRM should be actively involved as a change agent right from the start to establish and maintain the agile culture and mindset across the enterprise.True innovation and inspiration can only come from creative individuals, as knowledge workers they cannot be managed in old HRM structure. Reward them using intrinsic motivation methods as proven by Dan Pink. Once people are paid sufficiently, knowledge workers are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose. In an Agile organization, the environment encourages culture where people are able to frequently consult & evaluate their peers. Agile drives continuous improvement for individual and teams. How do we measure the performance of people and institutionalize the reward system?HRM can initiate the transformation from Traditional to Agile culture that transcends refinement of roles and job descriptions, salary and bonus schemes, personnel review, improvement processes, and rewarding systems.

Jagdish Karira is innovative, result-oriented, self-motivated, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe ®) Program Consultant 4.0, and Agile Transformation Leader who leads by example with proven track record of successful Business and IT Transformations. Recognized as HP’s Top Talent Health... Read More →

3:55pm

Customers want great products, but great products aren’t simply made. They are designed in an ecosystem, your organization, that can either amplify or dampen that creative process.

The problem is, that most companies haven’t been organized with these specific needs in mind, but are instead simplistically grouped by function. The good news is, organizations can be designed too. This session intends to share concepts and tools that will teach attendees how to frame and implement organization design actions.

Matt Barcomb has over 18 years of experience as a product development leader who takes a pragmatic, systems approach to change. He partners with organizations to help leadership teams develop & deploy strategy, optimize product management & development, and evolve traditional HR functions... Read More →

3:55pm

It's been said that for every complex problem there is an answer that's clear, simple and wrong. In order to keep our Agile transformation pointed in the right direction (our North Star) Quicken's team of Agile Coaches and Lean experts have developed a unique approach to tackling the problems facings organizations struggling with traction in their Agile Transformations. Join us for a compelling look at what it takes to stop doing Agile and to start being Agile.

Mike Ricard is an Agile coach with Quicken Loans. He is passionate about continuous improvement and has been studying the Toyota Production System for many years. Before joining Quicken, he worked with global leaders in manufacturing and healthcare, helping drive operational excellence... Read More →

3:55pm

It’s an accepted truth in software development; when deadlines loom the team will be pressured to GO FASTER. Unable to convince management of the risks, developers resign to cutting a few corners and working longer hours. Unfortunately the net result is just as predictable, a short term spike in velocity and months of hidden costs and delays to come.

This talk will cover how to reverse the velocity death spiral by building collaborative and high trust relationships with management. We'll cover the root causes of our collective distrust like estimation, accountability, communication, and abuse of power. Further we’ll explore how to have healthy, data supported discussions to enable developers and managers to resist short sighted solutions that will plague the team for years to come.

3:55pm

Is it really possible to have zero defects? The short answer is yes – if you are willing to change the way you collaborate, code, and test your application. Allowing defects in your software is an admission that it is okay to have a low quality product. This creates the mindset that believes quality is not important which is propagated throughout the code that is produced. Teams that have zero defects can deliver at a consistent pace and often more rapidly over the long term than teams that log their defects. Defects cost much more than is obvious. Between documenting, inventorying, prioritizing, reproducing, fixing, retesting and all the meetings and pizzas to get to releasable software, it is a huge amount of waste that many organizations believe is unavoidable. And then there comes the “hardening phase”! Join Cheezy as he brings more than a dozen years of hands-on experience coaching teams on agile engineering and team practices that drive quality higher. He will show what needs to change in your organization in order to have teams that truly focus on quality, deliver defect free software, and deliver more value to their customers. From source code management, to advanced development and testing techniques, to dev-ops and build pipelines, this talk is full of ideas and real life practices that you can take back to your work and utilize right away. By implementing these practices you can also help Cheezy with his lifetime goal of reducing the number of pizza parties (staying late at work) and increasing the number of beer parties (celebrations for a great release).

Jeff been helping companies improve the way they build software since the early days of Agile. His emphasis on Continuous Delivery has fostered new technical and collaborative techniques that help teams deliver high quality software every day. He is driven by Lean values and principles... Read More →

7:30am

8:45am

Who among us has not been invited into the homes and hearts of others? Who among us has not invited others into our homes and hearts? Every deep relationship begins with an invitation. Indeed, every great, beautiful, and even tragic endeavor shared by humans throughout history was begun with an invitation. An invitation to believe. An invitation to act. An invitation to achieve. An invitation to become.

We are all leaders and as a leader, this is your role - To invite others in to share in your passion and dreams. To invite others to contribute in their own unique way to that which you hope to create. To invite others to share in achieving your goals and resulting success. You become the host for the event. You craft the environment, you propose a purpose, you establish boundaries, and you invite others to participate.

With each invitation, you create a new opportunity. And with each invitation, you take a risk. As host, try as you might, you cannot control all aspects of the event. And you must choose; choose when to intervene and when to allow the unexpected to become the new course. You are both actor and observer, simultaneously in charge and subjugated. And whether it is a success or failure may still be a debate long after the event is over, but no matter how it comes to a close, it starts with an invitation.

Doc is passionate about working with teams to improve delivery and building great organizations. Once a dedicated code slinger, Doc has turned his energy toward helping teams, departments, and companies work better together in the pursuit of better software. Working with a wide range... Read More →

10:00am

Agile Leadership is ambiguously perceived as guiding an organization toward an agile approach. However, in doing so, most of these so called agile leaders are inadvertently working against their agile intentions through traditional thinking and behaviors. Leadership Agility, on the other hand, is a characteristic of the leader individually. Leadership Agility represents the agile mindset and actions of a leader in how they interact with others and lead the organization in an agile way. Join us to elicit your own "AHA" as we explore leadership stories grounded in a agile leadership development framework. Discover how unaware leaders, while well-intentioned, work against their own efforts. We will reorient leaders from an external focus on organizations and delivery and toward the leader's own internal thinking and behaviors.

Pete Behrens is a Leadership Agility Coach with Trail Ridge Consulting focusing on leadership and organizational agility.
He provides guidance to senior executives on how to transform themselves and their companies to work more effectively with more agility. His leadership has enhanced agility across many organizations including Salesforce.com, GE Health... Read More →

10:00am

We often look to our engineering teams first to drive efficiency and speed to deliver but as we optimize the flow of our development process we quickly create pressure in the organizational workflow with the activities that feed into and out of product delivery. Product definition struggles to keep pace and establish a queue of viable options to pull from. Marketing efforts begin to pile up as features release faster than we can share the news. All of this stems from optimizing one part of the overall system. In this talk we will look at how to scale Kanban practices to the entire organization to provide visibility, flexibility and predictability to every part of the business.

Colleen Johnson is the Practice Director of Lean and Agile Transformation at ImagineX Consulting. Colleen applies a systems thinking approach to aligning agile methodologies across the enterprise and works with clients to apply the right cultural and context-driven practices to create... Read More →

10:00am

Respect for People is one of the pillars of Lean. If you read the Lean-Agile literature or attend conferences, you will hear plenty about culture. However, these ideas usually aren’t presented as systematically and tangibly as the process tools. Most of the Lean principles that we study are focused on the other pillar, Continuous Improvement. Cultural ideas may be mixed in there but in a way that’s hard to untangle. Or, at the risk of ruffling some feathers, they may seem overly touchy-feely or theoretical brain science-y.That’s a real shame. A business can’t just be a nice place to work, full of nice people; it must deliver a steady stream of results for customers and financial stakeholders. But the best long-term results come from providing a sustainable, healthy work environment. So investing in a strong culture is a wise decision for executives and managers.This talk will explore some key ideas around team structure and the responsibilities of both team members and managers in a respectful Lean-Agile company. It will present a candidate set of seven principles to spell out Respect for People to match those for Continuous Improvement. And it will share some of the source material from which these ideas are derived.

Jon Terry is Chief Evangelist, Lean-Agile Strategy for Planview, a market leading provider of portfolio management, agile management, collaboration, and ideation software. Before that Jon was co-CEO and co-founder of LeanKit, which pioneered the application of Kanban in knowledge... Read More →

10:00am

Musicians and athletes spend most of their time practicing, not performing. As software developers if we only practice and learn on the job, then we will continue to make mistakes on code meant for customers. On the job, we can only deliver features as fast as the code base and our skills allow us. We must improve the quality of our skills which will in turn improve the quality of our code base. We must take the time to practice allowing ourselves to improve our skills and develop better “code sense”. Learn how the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto (http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/) provides a framework for us to improve in our craft. By learning a variety of code games we can collect a full toolbelt of activities that will help us improve as individuals. We can then take these games and give others the opportunity to improve and raise the level of the whole community. We’ll take a whirlwind tour of some different agile code games that will help us improve our craft.

A husband, father of four, and currently the Founding Software Craftsman of Greater Sum, Mike Clement believes we work best when we are working together and that there are no best practices—only better and worse ones depending on the context. Passionate about raising the bar of... Read More →

10:00am

We constantly talk about the value of communication but seldom in terms that technical teams tend to relate to. This session will use the object model, messages and the RESTful architectural style to examine how a development team interacts successfully (or not) with other elements in its system.

We'll discuss system thinking, software development as a service and map REST actions to team practices.

Andrew is a coach and facilitator who is passionate about helping teams improve product delivery and flow. He is focused on promoting shared understanding through better communication practices. He joined the agile community having survived a career of big-plan-up-front development... Read More →

10:00am

A few years ago everyone wanted to know how to convince their executives to go agile. Today's executives are asking their teams how they'll get them there. While we have made significant progress changing the hearts and minds of senior leadership, executives have a fiduciary responsibility to the performance of their organizations. They demand a greater level of assurance that what you plan to do is actually going to work. Executives are sick and tired of being told to trust the team and that everything will be okay. Better than anyone, executives see the dysfunction in their organizations. They want line of sight to how agile is going to help them make things better.

This talk is going to explore a safe, pragmatic, and repeatable formula for leading change in large organizations. The Holy Grail for an executive is to tie dollars spent and activities performed, to internal improvement metrics and ultimately improved business performance. We'll start by discussing the elements of an agile transformation business case and how to identify a meaningful value proposition for change. Next we'll consider how to assess the organization and build an agile transformation strategy and roadmap that encourages an iterative and incremental approach to change. Finally we'll explore the metrics and controls that help you know if you're on the right track.

Throughout the presentation, we'll explore the change management and engagement techniques necessary to make sure you are building meaningful organizational support as you engage the enterprise. We'll discuss how to build and execute a change management strategy to keep everyone safe and informed throughout the transformation. We'll show how to sustain and improve the changes over time, ultimately creating an organizational ecosystem where business agility is part of the fundamental DNA of the company. The goal of this talk is to take the magic out of agile transformation and show you how to systematically and planfully introduce agile into your organization.

Mike Cottmeyer, LeadingAgile founder and CEO, is passionate about solving the challenges associated with Agile in larger, more complex enterprises. To that end, his company is dedicated to providing large-scale Agile transformation services to help pragmatically, incrementally, and... Read More →

10:00am

There is no such thing as work-life balance. It's all part of life, and balance means something different to each one of us. In this workshop, Stephanie will share a framework to help you create your best integrated life: a life with joy, fulfillment, and balance. Have you ever thought about how agile principles and techniques could apply to other areas of your life? Let's go way beyond a kanban board. Let's explore how you can design your best life by treating your life as the product. This framework comes from what she has learned exploring and experimenting over the past decade, including a two-year travel sabbatical in Latin America, creating a more sustainable lifestyle, and a career evolution to Scrum Master, Professional Scrum Trainer, and Leadership Coach. In this talk, we will discuss: * What does it mean to have an integrated life * How to identify what is important to you and align to your values and priorities * The importance of leadership skills and emotional intelligence * Techniques for maintaining focus, continuous improvement, and adapting to change Participants will walk away with a framework that can be applied to move towards an integrated life, resources to explore concepts further, and inspiration to be extraordinary in our conventional world.

Stephanie is a Scrum.org certified Professional Scrum Trainer, Scrum Master, and Co-Active Coach. She is one of Scrum.org's Professional Scrum Master (PSM) Curriculum Stewards, working with the trainer community and Ken Schwaber to carry forward the course vision. She has over... Read More →

10:00am

In agile teams, it’s inevitable that team members are expected to be more cross-functional and produce high quality product for their customers. How can agile team members become more cross-functional and take ownership of quality? Often times there seems to be a scarcity of testing talents in agile teams. How can agile teams attain highest quality product when working with very few or no testing talents?

For agile team members to take ownership of quality, Pradeepa Narayanaswamy exposes the power of “Pair Testing” that greatly supports providing faster feedback and producing high quality product all along as a team. For the scarce testing talents and an effective way to become more cross-functional, one approach is for team members to pair up on various (unit, integration, exploratory and several other) testing efforts that ensures the shared eye on quality and learning. Pradeepa talks about several pairing options and opportunities between various specialties in an agile team. She also talks about some “non-typical” pairing opportunities with DevOps, Operations, Sales, Marketing and Support members to name a few.

As a new or an experienced agile team member, learn how to spearhead this technique in your team at various levels and spread the buzz to other teams. As a tester, learn how to get the non-testing talents excited and experience the value of pair testing.

As an Agile Coach, I am a self-proclaimed “Agile Passionista” who strongly believes in agile values & principles to help organizations delight their customers. I help teams and leaders understanding & aligning with their organizational vision and support in their transformation... Read More →

10:00am

Amber Conville is a developer at Test Double (testdouble.com), and has been a software developer for several years. She also is the founder and organizer of Self.conference (selfconference.org), a local conference about tech and people. She loves code in lots of languages, tdd, craftsmanship... Read More →

10:00am

Open Space Technology is one way to enable all kinds of people, in any kind of organization, to create inspired meetings and events. Over the last 20+ years, it has also become clear that opening space, as an intentional leadership practice, can create inspired organizations, where ordinary people work together to create extraordinary results with regularity.

In Open Space meetings, events and organizations, participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel working sessions around a central theme of strategic importance, such as: What is the strategy, group, organization or community that all stakeholders can support and work together to create?

With groups of 5 to 2000+ people — working in one-day workshops, three-day conferences, or the regular weekly staff meeting — the common result is a powerful, effective connecting and strengthening of what’s already happening in the organization: planning and action, learning and doing, passion and responsibility, participation and performance.

April Jefferson is an Agile transformation consultant and organizational change coach. She is passionate about empowering others to foster social change and uses Agile, Lean, UX, design thinking and open space to create awesome solutions and positive organizational cultures. She helps... Read More →

10:55am

This session will will explore key Continuous Delivery concepts and see how they can be implemented using a variety of open source tools via a live Demo. The demo will start from scratch and build all the necessary pieces.

10:55am

The most valuable tool is the one that gets used. Get automation into your toolset. We'll be talking about one way to lower the entrance barrier to automation via an open-source automation framework, all without breaking the bank. RobotFramework doesn't require development experience to get started, but is easily extensible by those that have it. We'll be touching on: - Supported technologies - Getting started/Basic use - The potential for Gherkin integration - Customization - Anything else we have time for At a minimum, you'll leave with: - A link to a github repo with instructions to get started and a basic project structure.

Kent is a Software Test Engineer at ProQuest and certified Scrum Master. He started in the software industry in 1998, and has worked almost exclusively in testing roles. He's worked in a variety of companies over the years, ranging from a small startup to the largest corporation out... Read More →

10:55am

DevOps and Regulatory Compliance, two critically important ingredients in todays connected organization. The first enables you to move quickly and respond to change in an era where change is increasing at an exponential rate and shows no sign of slowing down. The second protects your organization from exposure by hackers, privacy, and internal corruption and appears to require a slow and methodical approach to risk management. These two ideas seem to be incompatible at first glance, but they actually go together like peanut butter and jelly. While maintaining, analyzing, confirming, and reporting on the status of required information security, compliance, and privacy controls is a difficult and significant task for our industry, integrating it within your DevOps/Continuous Delivery pipeline is easier than you think. Using examples taken from real-world projects in companies just like yours, learn how to integrate compliance and reporting into your projects using tools such as Pair Programming, Jenkins, Chef, Metasploit, and others. When it comes to compliance, it’s not about Oil and Water, it’s “Peanut Butter Jelly Time”.

A self-proclaimed nerd, Brandon Carlson works for Lean TECHniques Inc., an IT consultancy that helps teams deliver high-value, high-quality products to market. Passionate about elevating IT performance, over the past twenty years he has helped numerous organizations from startups... Read More →

10:55am

Elm allows you to iterate faster with its expressive type system and zero runtime errors. In this session, you'll get an introduction to The Elm Architecture as well as some hands-on experience with it.

Dillon is an Agile/Software Craftsmanship Coach based out of Southern California. He is passionate about helping teams break down silos and reduce code complexity. In recent years, he has been exploring using functional programming languages as a tool for technical safety and evolutionary... Read More →

10:55am

Just as MSWord16 doesn't work on a laptop with Windows XP, some new methods of working are failing to deliver on their promises because we're trying to install them in environments that need an upgrade. Join Sue Johnston in a lively exploration of what happens when traditional management thinking gets in the way of innovation and progress towards organizational goals. We can't create positive and lasting change through action, alone. We need to change the way we - and those around us - think about our teams and our work. You'll leave with: - an appreciation of the role of mindset on project success - a fresh approach to influencing others to produce good outcomes - techniques to shift from unilateral control to collaborative learning Come and learn how to provide the operating system for highly productive teams. Warning: There will be hard thinking about soft skills in this interactive session.

Sue Johnston's interests have always been communication and teamwork. After a journalism career, she held senior management roles at two Canadian banks, where she was involved in large scale change initiatives and technology implementations. That's where she discovered that the critical... Read More →

11:45am

1:00pm

Gaining agility is different than "doing agile", particularly at scale. This session will start with how agility makes a difference for the business and for the teams adopting it. We will look at the business structures that are needed for agility to thrive, how teams are organized and the new measures that will redefine success. With agility, one size does not fit all, but there are proven solutions, and this session will look at success stories as well as the dead-ends every organization wants to avoid. This session is appropriate for anyone starting an agile transformation, but we will also explore agility nuances that can make the difference between the success and failure of your agile transformation.

Tom Churchwell is an experienced IT transformation leader who is passionate about helping people, organizations and communities change things for the better. Tom carries a wealth of knowledge and expertise from his thirty-year career in IT and has formerly served as a Principal Consultant... Read More →

1:00pm

When your team compositions change it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong - it could be the secret to your success. Different companies have thrived through dynamic reteaming - the act of moving people around teams in different ways. In this talk I'll share stories from different companies who are living this reality, such as Menlo Innovations, Spotify, Chef, Hunter Industries and AppFolio.

Heidi Helfand is Director of Engineering Excellence at Procore Technologies, creators of cloud-based software for the construction industry. She is the author of the book Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams which challenges the notion that you need to keep your... Read More →

1:00pm

You’ve got doctor appointments to schedule for yourself and your family, your next report is due in two days, the car needs gas, you need to schedule your kids summer camp before all the slots fill up, your email in-box has over 100 messages, and your first meeting is in 10 minutes. Does this sound like your day? If you’re like many of us, your daily life is filled with numerous tasks, projects, and duties that sometimes overwhelm even the best planners. Does pulling an all-nighter sound familiar to you? Often we let these things fester and languish only to overwhelm us later in a flurry of last minute to-do’s that quickly turns into utter chaos. How can you tackle this chaos and turn it into something manageable? The solution can be simpler than you may think, Personal Kanban.

While you may be familiar with Kanban for your work teams to visualize and manage work, this session describes how to use the Kanban method for your personal activities by focusing on simplicity, visualization, and prioritization of your tasks.

Helene has been using a form of this method since approximately 2007 and the process has been her constant companion through graduations, weddings, holiday plans, and work commitments. Through her dedication to this process she’s maintained a regular exercise regime, kept key items moving, avoided any last minute panics or rushes, and obtained 7-8 hours of sleep nightly.

Come learn how to turn your daily chaos into a manageable process and leave with a start on your own personal Kanban.

Helene Gidley, PMP, CSM, is an agile coach and the owner of HSG Consulting LLC where she provides coaching and training to teams navigating their agile journeys. She has over thirty years of experience in the IT industry at Fortune 500, startups, and mid-sized companies bringing broad... Read More →

1:00pm

Agile encourages us to eliminate activities that don't add value and find the simplest solution possible to solve our business needs. For many teams, that can lead to a state where collaborative design no longer happens or is discussed on a whiteboard that gets erased after the conversation. How then, can you share the knowledge with team members who don’t work on that component, or who join the team after the system is built?

I'll present a very simple method that can help everyone understand what the team plans to create or change in your current systems before it's built, that can also be retained to increase the domain knowledge for that system later.

Colleen Esposito believes that agile is changing the world, and is proud to be in the community that's doing it. Seeing people come alive and be part of the good side of humanity keeps her moving forward to create more of it.

1:00pm

Three key skills of a good leader are EAR (Empathy, Accountability, and Rewards). To be a good leader, one needs to practice these skills over and over again. My goal is not to give you the tips and tricks that makes you better overnight but to show you ways you can sharpen these skills according to your environment.

Dillon is an Agile/Software Craftsmanship Coach based out of Southern California. He is passionate about helping teams break down silos and reduce code complexity. In recent years, he has been exploring using functional programming languages as a tool for technical safety and evolutionary... Read More →

1:00pm

The White Bead Corporation is looking for Above Average Employees for expanded production. On the job training provided. Earn bonuses! The White Bead Corporation is a proud producer of shiny, perfect, white beads. We work hard to meet our customer’s exacting demands and won’t settle for anything less than perfection. We need Willing Workers who are Above Average Employees to handle this rigorous task in an inspiring environment. Apply within.

In this interactive experiment made famous by Dr. Deming, we'll explore the link between typical management techniques, human factors and overall quality. You'll learn how whole system dynamics play a much larger factor in quality than a simple testing activity at the end of production.

Mike is an Agile Coach and Trainer, full of passion for coaching people and teams. He fully believes in the agile principles and strives to incorporate them into everyday living. Mike believes agile is a better way to work and live and supports teams in adopting and improving these... Read More →

1:00pm

Colocated Agile is the easiest way to do a hard thing. Distributed Agile is harder. But it's 2017! It's strategically valuable to be able to work effectively with people no matter where they are. Bring your laptops and prepare to experience the basic mechanics, pitfalls, and techniques of distributed teamwork, including "remote" pairing.

Jeff is a software craftsperson and coach for Pillar Technologies. His work is focused on the interface between engineering practices and sometimes-overlooked "soft skills". His passion for helping others and developing talent has lead him to contribute to AgileSkillsProject.org... Read More →

1:00pm

So what does Collaboration really mean? It's just ensuring people understand what each other is doing right? Using a simple simulation, we'll illustrate what true collaboration means. Over the course of several iterations, we're going to increase the effectiveness of participation across the participants and see what the effect is on productivity. Prepare to be surprised! Once we understand how collaboration makes an impact on our team productivity, we'll delve into what helps or hinders this from happening at our work and some of the models that help us understand collaboration and how we can apply them for improving our teams.

Paul is an IT Executive Coach with Excella Consulting helping managers and teams improve their game. He focuses on pragmatic ways Agile, Lean, and leadership techniques can applied to make organizations more effective. Paul has led small teams to large groups as a development manager... Read More →

1:55pm

Since the birth of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, people try to interpret it by creating frameworks and methodologies as a way to standardize and regulate the implementation of agile. In doing this, they take the focus from the true core value of agile and direct it toward the mechanics of their frameworks or methodologies.This presentation introduces the cargo cult effect and covers some of the anti-patterns of agile frameworks and methodologies. Focusing on the core value of agile and discouraging the idea of going through the motion of a framework to achieve mastery. Also, this presentation sheds a light on Joshua Kerievsky's wise ideas of “Modern Agile” and the simplicity and power of the Modern Agile's four guiding principles.

"Fadi Khoury is an agile transformation coach at Ford Motor Company, he has more than eighteen years of experience in software development, software maintenance and testing, software lifecycle methodologies, IT portfolio management, program and project management, risk management... Read More →

1:55pm

Any organization that has attempted to shift toward more of an agile approach knows that it isn’t easy. In this session we'll review the top characteristics of healthy agile teams and look at what they did to get there. We’ll also review some of their struggles and discuss how we might be able to avoid them in our own journey’s.

1:55pm

When creating a play or movie, what are the first three rules of directing? Casting, casting, and casting. How does Saturday Night Live produce sketch after sketch of comedy? By iterating. The principles of leadership and management in the worlds of theatre, TV and film offer a multitude of lessons for those who are leading high performing Agile teams. In this talk, John Krewson will walk through the journey of creating and delivering theatrical and film productions, then show how those principles can be used to improve the process of software delivery. He’ll dive into specific approaches and methods used by performers and directors that harness creativity, develop shared understanding, empower and motivate teams, and manage focus. The session will include multiple interactive demonstrations to further illustrate the application of these principles.

John Krewson is the founder and President of Sketch Development Services, a software development studio that provides Agile coaching, consulting and training. Sketch delivers software for its customers using Agile principles and practices, and helps other organizations with their... Read More →

1:55pm

Ever find yourself struggling to know when to say something and when to stay quiet with your teams? Self-organizing teams might not learn to solve their own problems if we continually step in as a coaches. Conversely, what value are we adding if we primarily observe? This session will explore both ends of the talking spectrum so Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches can feel more confident in their actions.

Allison Pollard helps people discover their agile instincts and develop their coaching abilities. As an agile coach with Improving in Dallas, Allison enjoys mentoring others to become great Scrum Masters, coaching managers to grow teams that deliver amazing results, and fostering... Read More →

2:40pm

3:00pm

Agile transformations are really hard. Trying to do them from 8500 miles away is neigh impossible. This is a case study in remote Agile coaching; what worked, what did not, and what were lessons learned.

3:00pm

What a lot of people call "agile" is a dreary, unpleasant, hurried feature mill. It tends to be driven by expensive tools that must be fed constantly.

Years ago, we realized that something had to be done. Amid cries of "agile is dead" and "take back agile!" we have had a resurgence of the ideas that had earlier made agile software development meaningful, but which have been lost in the rush to make sales and consulting dollars.

What is Modern Agile? How does it help us take agile back? How does it take us beyond software?

Tim is a long-time programmer (since 1979), reviewer, speaker, writer. He has been active in many of the big changes in software over the past 36 years (including Design Patterns, Object-Oriented Design, and Agile software development). | | In addition to his contributions in "Clean... Read More →

3:00pm

Do you avoid failure? This session is about how you can use failure to learn faster, build better systems, and enable innovative organizations. Learn about cognitive biases, like regret avoidance, that need to be overcome to move past the stigma of failing. Explore experimenting with failure to supercharge learning. Investigate the skills to reframe failure and enable a mindset and culture suitable for success in a world full of random events. Come succeed at failing!

Steve Jackson is a double agent at Test Double. He loves creating unique solutions and solving impossible problems with software. Steve is passionate about improving the craft of delivering software and fostering environments where professionals want to continuously improve. You can... Read More →

3:00pm

Lean, Agile, Digital, Two-speed, DevOps, DevSecOps, Enterprise Accelerators, and Lean Startup… where's a change leader to start? Company leadership around the world recognizes the opportunities, and the urgency, in driving effective change and creating room for rapid innovation in their organization, yet the market landscape in transformation is becoming increasingly cluttered.

It is unwise to "pick" a single model to follow, and that's especially true when you're tackling business-wide transformation, across the multiple operational value streams that comprise your modern enterprise. Addressing transformation as one of these specific things tends to be too narrow and cause multiple transformation programs with overlapping and duplicative work to emerge.

Additionally, any one “departmental” transformation cannot be sustainably successful without the various operational value streams increasing agility as well. In fact, creating a successful sustainable business-wide agile transformation requires bouncing back and forth between "systemic fix" and "deep value steam fix" mindsets on a continuous basis.

In this session, we use CA's internal "agile" transformation as a backdrop as we share the key mindsets of effective transformation we've learned supporting hundreds of companies in their change journeys.

3:00pm

What does “Team Trust” mean? In the safe space of your team: being open, being honest, being vulnerable. And also: starting new, sharing knowledge, accepting feedback, showing courage, learning, growing together. If you want to learn about a deep, impressive and fun way to grow team trust, join this LEGO session!

On a meta level, this session will introduce you to the basics of using LEGO blocks for a workshop. With hands-on exercises, we will go thru a series of building tasks with LEGO blocks, information sharing and receiving feedback. Thru Solution Focused Coaching techniques, attendees will generate insights into their situation and find possible solutions. Back to the meta view, we will examine variations to use these workshop steps in team context.

Participants will walk away from this workshop with structured, creative and fun plan for immediate use in their next team lift-off or retrospective, and lead their team to more trust and better teamwork!

3:00pm

Have your retrospectives turned into a repetitive ceremony? Do you feel your team looks forward to the end of the retrospective more than the beginning? Many Agile teams fall into the trap of "following the motions" when it comes to a retrospective and begin to lose sight of its goal...inspect and adapt! During this workshop you'll learn, practice, and create a series of creative techniques to get your team engaged and energized about their retrospective. The session will include an overivew of different types of retrospective formats (ex. Traditional Retro, Lean Coffee Style, Lego Build Exercise, and many more) and a review of critical facilitator tips. You will also have the opportunity to work in a team to device your own, unique retrospective technique to share with the larger group.

Mark Cruth is an Agile Coach, Scrum Master, Product Owner, and catalyst for change in organizations. Since being introduced to Agile in 2009, Mark has made it his mission to inject the values and principles of Agile into everything he does. He has worked to bring about Agile Transformation... Read More →

3:00pm

SOUND LIKE YOUR ORGANIZATION?Developers: “QA tests for us but we frequently experience production issues, for many reasons, so we end up just patching the code and getting back to our planned work. We're curious about testing as part of development but nobody here has any experience and project timelines don't give us any time to experiment or learn.”

Testers: “We’re told that Automating Acceptance Testing could be beneficial, but we don’t code and we don’t work closely with the developers.”

Senior Management: “These dates are important to our business, we’re committed to them. And yes, we see the need for change but planning for it takes too much time.”

Does this sound like your organization? Clearly these are examples of broad organizational dysfunctions. In this workshop we discuss and demonstrate developing from the outside-in and the team practices of Behavior-Driven Development and Test-Driven Development that result in healthy code with well aligned tests.

WHAT WILL YOU LEARN? In this workshop we introduce you to the practice of Behavior-Driven Development partnered with Test-Driven Development. Participants will learn:· To utilize business language to describe the behavior of product features· To run that behavior and have it inform the team ‘what’ (code, database, infrastructure) needs to be created next· To utilize tests to guide the design of the code· To write the test first, thereby starting with a measurable goal. And running the test tells you exactly what to do next to meet your goal.· To utilize TDD as a beneficial accompaniment to a Continuous Integration pipeline· To verify and validate that you are ‘Building it the Right Thing, Right’.

During the workshop we expose participants to discussions, presentations and short exercises on BDD and TDD. Participants leave with insights on patterns of collaboration and communication to apply to their own domains.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?This workshop is targeted towards Leadership in organizations that are challenged by Agile; additionally, it targets every role on cross-functional teams.

Bill is an agile Coach, Trainer and software developer with extensive experience guiding teams and executives in adopting and adapting agile practices for positive outcomes. With a pragmatic perspective, he guide teams towards a common vision, strengthen collaboration and improved... Read More →

As a child of the 80’s, Kieran first encountered computers playing games and coding on a TRS-80 and exploring online bulletin boards when the telephone was available. As a software developer, Kieran is committed to test driven development as a professional practice and to advancing... Read More →

3:00pm

Play is a powerful method to learn! Come and play some simple agile games that use playing cards, index cards and dice to explore the different values that are at the foundation of Agile and Lean development practices. In addition to your own insights, you may be able to take these game back to work to share with your co-workers. This is a hands-on session so come prepared to have some fun! There is no "right" answer to what you're "supposed to" learn from a game, so come ready to discover your own insights into software development processes and teamwork.

A husband, father of four, and currently the Founding Software Craftsman of Greater Sum, Mike Clement believes we work best when we are working together and that there are no best practices—only better and worse ones depending on the context. Passionate about raising the bar of... Read More →

3:00pm

Let's face it....we all love lift and carry templates. Arthur Murray was made famous by his footstep diagrams for learning complex dances. I promise mine are a lot easier to follow than learning the Foxtrot! Maybe you just got asked to facilitate a session with no time to prepare, or maybe you are just getting started with branching out into some new exercises. Maybe you'd like to take some new ideas back to your teammates to experiment with in the privacy of your trusted team. No matter what, it's handy to have a pre-laid out agenda at the ready. The goal of this session is to be interactive and allow you to walk away with a large group facilitation guide that you have personally experienced and discussed the facilitation techniques here at the conference. The flow we are going to follow is one that I've used with many different Agile programs. We'll look at the "why" behind each exercise and the purpose it should be fulfilling with your group. Then we'll run the exercise together and discuss pros/cons, and facilitation tips/tricks. Exercises Flow: - Warm-Up question (check-in) - Tribes - Constellations - Sailboat + Debrief: - Wind in Sails - Anchors - Steering Wheel on the boat - Life Preserver

I'm an American with DUAL citizenship, so therefore I'm also Australian! :)I'm working locally in Australia for all of 2018, doing some Agile coaching at the Department of Human Services.Bio:Billie is a 'force of nature' breaking up the boulders blocking transformation; building bridges... Read More →

3:55pm

A panel discussion hosted by John Le Drew, with Amitai Schleier, Tim Ottinger and April Jefferson.

We want to explore and discuss the effects of blame, shame and punishment in organisations. What does a blame culture look and feel like? Can you have personal accountability without blame? How do you handle negative behaviours without some form of punishment? Have other questions? Bring them the session and join in the discussion!

John has over 17 years of experience working in software engineering as a system administrator, software engineer, technical lead, technical director, development manager and agile coach. He currently runs the consultancy firm Wise Noodles here he helps organisations solve tough technical... Read More →

April Jefferson is an Agile transformation consultant and organizational change coach. She is passionate about empowering others to foster social change and uses Agile, Lean, UX, design thinking and open space to create awesome solutions and positive organizational cultures. She helps... Read More →

Tim is a long-time programmer (since 1979), reviewer, speaker, writer. He has been active in many of the big changes in software over the past 36 years (including Design Patterns, Object-Oriented Design, and Agile software development). | | In addition to his contributions in "Clean... Read More →

3:55pm

If leaders want their teams to adopt Agile practices and prioritize highest value initiatives with complete transparency and accountability, they must first incorporate these values in their own lives.

In today’s business environment, you can’t afford to drift slowly and resist change. You have to move quickly, adapt frequently, and turn on a dime when conditions demand it. This is not always easy to do; organizations of all types and sizes often become rooted in habits and processes that get in the way of efficiency and productivity. Adopting Lean-agile practices is a great way to break free from those impediments. However, if Leaders want their teams to adopt and maintain these practices, they must live those values themselves and initiate a cultural transition that is both effective and lasting. This session leverages methods and techniques designed to balance autonomy and control while adapting to achieve business, customer, and people delight – and striving to keep it Lean.

Jon Stahl is the CEO and co-founder of LeanDog, a company that is focused on Lean-Agile consulting as well as product design and delivery. Jon has been practicing and upholding the values of the Agile Manifesto and Lean for over 12 years. He teaches and coaches companies, at all levels... Read More →

3:55pm

Agile and lean startup thought leaders keep spouting the mantra, “Fail fast! Fail often!” to encourage an experimentation mindset, but which experiments matter? Which experiments will have a positive and lasting impact on employees? Customers? Products? The theory of constraints can help identify the right experiments to run at the right time to maximize value created and grow a culture of learning.

This lecture is intended for leaders, managers, and change agents seeking to understand how to select and design optimization or investment experiments that accelerate the adoption of an Agile mindset.

Matt Barcomb has over 18 years of experience as a product development leader who takes a pragmatic, systems approach to change. He partners with organizations to help leadership teams develop & deploy strategy, optimize product management & development, and evolve traditional HR functions... Read More →

Cat specializes in lean inspired, data informed leadership and coaching. She is passionate about increasing diversity in STEAM as a means of creating the possibility of a more equitable human future based on generative institutions. In her leisure time, Cat enjoys making jokes about... Read More →

3:55pm

Are you as powerful as you need to be? Do you over power the room and rub people the wrong way? Why is that? What if there was something you could do about it? In improvisation, in order to create realistic and compelling characters we study status. That is, how does how we carry ourselves impact our relationship status with other people and how does it change in relation to others? In this session, we'll explore status, and play with making ourselves more or less powerful. We'll then examine how this plays out in our work environments and how we need to adjust our status depending on which groups or individuals we're interacting with. You'll also learn the one status trick that will dramatically increase your chances of getting hired in your next interview.

Todd helps leaders become intentional about their organizational culture, so that they can revolutionize the way they work. Todd combines his background in Improv with over 15 years of experience in the software industry as a Developer, Manager, Agile Coach, and Lean Startup Mentor... Read More →